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meshdesk file
Background
- MESHdesk use the LEDs of the device it is installed on to signal about the environment.
- During startup one LED signals about the method it uses to try and fetch settings from the controller.
- After startup, if the device is used in a mesh network it, this LED signals how many neighboring nodes it sees.
- A second LED is used to indicate if the device has proper contact with the controller. (The LED can be either ON or OFF in such a case)
- Finally on mesh networks we can also specify a third LED that will indicate mesh traffic flowing through a node.
Exploring our hardware
- Lets look at the Xiaomi 4A 100M as a sample.
#change directory to where the LEDs are cd /sys/class/leds/ ls #These are the LEDs available blue:power mt76-phy0 mt76-phy1 yellow:power #turn it off echo "0" > yellow\:power/brightness #turn it on echo "1" > yellow\:power/brightness #turn it off echo "0" > blue\:power/brightness #turn it on echo "1" > blue\:power/brightness
- We can use the blue LED to signal during startup and neighbor counts.
- We can also use the yellow LED to light up if communication to the controller is broken.
- There is however not a third LED so we will not define one for the mesh traffic.
Add a hardware section for our device
- With this info we can create a hardware section in /etc/config/meshdesk
config hardware 'xiaomi_4a_100' option morse_led '/sys/class/leds/blue:power/brightness' option internet_led '/sys/class/leds/yellow:power/brightness' option wifi_led 'led0'
Adjust the settings section accordingly
- There are two important options here to adjust
- hardware - have to match the value of a hardware definition under the settings section.
- id_if - have to match the interface specified in the wan_network file.
config settings 'settings' option hardware 'xiaomi_4a_100' option id_if 'eth0' option lan_up_file '/tmp/lan_up'
- Don't make the name of the hardware section more than 14characters. Longer names break things during deployment.
- Devices where the interface used in wan_network is eth0.1 simply use eth0 here.
- Later we will also use the value of xiaomi_4a_100 to define the hardware on the controller.
Alarm On or Alarm Off?
- We use the yellow LED as an alarm which means it has to light up when communication to the controller is down.
- Since we want the yellow LED to be off when the communication to the controller is fine we need to check what the current setup is.
vi /etc/MESHdesk/reporting/report_to_server.lua #Look for this section if(ok_flag)then internetLED('0'); -- NOTE Here we can swap them around eg make it 0 to turn off a red LED when the internet is OK checkForContollerReboot('1'); else internetLED('1'); checkForContollerReboot('0'); end
Review new hardware
- The following table lists the important items with comments
| Item | Typical value | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| settings → hardware | xiaomi_4a_100 | Must match a hw definition in the file itself |
| settings → id_if | eth0 | eg eth0, eth1 or wan - NOT eth0.1 (for those boards its just eth0) |
| settings → skip_radio_0 | 0 | set to 1 when radio0 is a 5G radio and you don't want to use it for config SSID |
Remember Your Environment
- Finally you need to adjust some items to match up with your controller and its environment.
- The following table lists some of the important items with comments
Key environment items
| Item | Typical value | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| internet1 → disabled | 1 | change it to 0 in order for the device to be centrally controlled |
| internet1 → dns | cloud.radiusdesk.com | Supply Dummy Value If Not Using DNS System e.g. nohost.radiusdesk.com |
| internet1 → protocol | https | Can be http or https |
| internet1 → ip | 176.31.15.210 | Fallback when FQDN does not resolve on FQDN not used |
- We are nearly done. The last stop is to edit the captive_config.json file to fit our specific hardware.